Mozilla, sticking to its ideals of the open web, decided long ago that support for the patent-encumbered H264 codec would not be included in any of its products. Not only is H264 wholly incompatible with the open web and Free software, it is also incredibly expensive. Mozilla could use one of the open source implementations, but those are not licensed, and the MPEG-LA has been quite clear in that it will sue those who encode or decode H264 content without a license. Software patents, however, are only valid in some parts of the world, so an enterprising developer has started a project that was sure to come eventually: Firefox builds with H264 support.

If this is the case, then from a technical standpoint alone, because it is far less demanding of CPU for decoding, Theora should be the only codec for HTML5.

Only if you use the CPU for decoding. But H264 already is widely decoded by specialized hardware chips, both on PC video cards and on mobile devices. When that is the case H264 decoding is done with near zero CPU load, freeing the CPU for other tasks.

That's one of the problems that proponents of Theora and open standards will have to overcome: members of MPEG-LA are the ones that get to dictate which devices get hardware video decoding, and for which codec.

Because of this, Theora is a no go on mobile devices; decoding it in software is simply not practical in the near future. It is acceptable on PC's because the average consumer PC has enough juice nowadays to cope with video software decoding and keep the UI responsive at the same time.

"If this is the case, then from a technical standpoint alone, because it is far less demanding of CPU for decoding, Theora should be the only codec for HTML5.

Only if you use the CPU for decoding. But H264 already is widely decoded by specialized hardware chips, both on PC video cards and on mobile devices. When that is the case H264 decoding is done with near zero CPU load, freeing the CPU for other tasks. "

Err, you didn't read the post to which I was replying, did you. That post claimed this:

To do this, the video decoding has to be part of the browser engine

So, when you say that "H264 already is widely decoded by specialized hardware chips" the actual point to which I was replying (to whit, the bit about the video decoding having to be part of the browser engine) went wooooosh right over your head, didn't it?

Because of this, Theora is a no go on mobile devices; decoding it in software is simply not practical in the near future.